Saturday, June 21, 2008

CS Community: Translating and Explaining Compressed Sensing to Strangers.

If you recall this entry (Traduction de Compressed Sensing en Francais), a discussion with Emmanuel Candes led to a french translation for CS: Acquisition Comprimée. I asked the same question to Andriyan Suksmono for how to say it in Indonesian and he responded by:
So, I translate it the CS to "penginderaan kompresif", where "penginderaan" means "sensing" and, of course, "kompresif" means compressive in English. Additionally, imaging translate to "pencitraan".
When I asked Jort Gemmeke, this is what he responded:
Hmm the short answer...don't translate :-s
Usually with (technical) terms like that, we dutch people/scientists don't even bother translating it :)

However, if I would have to, I'd say something like "compressed/compressive
sensing" = "gecomprimeerd waarnemen", maybe even "samengevat waarnemen".
And "Compressed imaging" = "gecomprimeerd/samengevat afbeelden".

I have seen the same thing in French, i.e. the desire to keep the English term as is. This can be seen as a need for non-English speaking scientific communities to have an impact and be well referenced in English publications. Using the same keyword will make sure that they are cited appropriately. However, the reason of this exercise has more to do with using the right wording when describing the subject to specialized journalists and people that are either not in the field or non technical. As it happens the term is automatically translated in tech publications, it might as well get some guidance:

En: Compressed Sensing/Compressive Sensing *** Compressive Imaging

Fr: Acquisition Comprimée *** Imagerie Comprimée (?)

Id: Penginderaan Kompresif *** Pencitraan Kompresif

Dutch: gecomprimeerd waarnemen / samengevat waarnemen *** gecomprimeerd/samengevat afbeelden

I look forward for translations in other languages. I'll set up a page putting these contributions. As I see that the subject area being talked about in other languages: Japanese (or here), Vietnamese,...

On a related note, how do you describe/explain Compressed Sensing to people in your family (Grandparents,....) ? Knowing that most people don't even know much about transform coding. How about: CS is about sensing and compressing information at the same time ? However, this doesn't catch the concept of sparsity.

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